Apr 28, 2011

Sounds in Between, SIB Radio Gowanus

for most of 2011 I have been a presenter of the programme Avant Gardening, which runs from 10:30-12:30 every Sunday on Radio One 91FM, Dunedin, directly after radia at 10pm. On the 24th April I played the first of two 2-hour broadcasts of SiB Radio Gowanus, a four hour edit of a multi-artist narrowcast radio installation project curated by Maria Papadomanolaki, initially sited in Cabinet Magazine's Gallery Space in Brooklyn, 17th-19th of March 2010. Radio Cegeste was one of the contributing artists to the original show, with a piece called The Book of Margins, recorded in None Gallery in 2009, so it was great to host its return to the Dunedin airwaves.

curator Maria Papadomanolaki writes :

"Around the mid-1950s, Guy Debord coined a new genre of city mapping and exploration under the alias of Psychogeography. The serious “academic” model of creative expression was refined into a playful, intuitive and inventive quest of unseen and undiscovered urban cues and layers. “Postcards from Gowanus” and its radio exhibit “Sib Radio Gowanus” find a significant point of reference to the Debordian state of mind and suggest a new eye, ear and psyche to the landscape of Gowanus. The actual exhibits in the gallery claim a physical presence while the ethereal soundscapes create a new intimate locale inside the listener’s mind and psyche. “Sib Radio Gowanus” echoes the idea of radio as a wunderkammer. However, itsurrogates this notion to an organic sonotopia that inhabits the audiovisual exhibits in a process of associative interaction. On a final note, the exhibition, as its title reveals, offers fragments of the artists’ audiovisual expeditions in the form of postcard-artifacts that encapsulate, in the best possible and “timeless” manner, the essence of the experienced urban environments. “Postcards from Gowanus” is a short but dense time travel to the heterogeneous manifestations of the surrounding area as encountered in snapshot mode by the different participants."